With significant technical progress in recent years, computers capable of performing a plurality of functions including those for operation as a television set, running a computer game, displaying digital video, and processing e-mail in each single apparatus in parallel have been prevailing. One of the technical challenges essential to developing computers with such performance is a speedup in processing. Aside from improving the processing speeds of respective modules that constitute a computer, the speedup in processing can also be effected by making efficient use of quantitative and temporal resources which are supplied from those modules. For example, multiprocessor-based parallel processing may be performed to provide faster arithmetic processing. Functions to be used by such software as application software and utility software may be retained separately as components and loaded as needed to provide efficient processing.
Technical development of the foregoing components, the pieces of software themselves, and the basic software or operating systems (hereinafter, referred to as OSes) has been advancing day by day, and users are wanting to update to the latest versions of these in order to enhance the performance of their computers. Nevertheless, since software is typically effected by the cooperation of various pieces of software themselves and components, OSes, and apparatuses, separate updating can sometimes impair compatibility and cause problems during software operation. Consequently, Japanese Patent Laid Open Publication 2001-331324 discloses techniques in which files that describe version compatibility are added to the components so that compatibility is managed separately for efficient updating and compatibility problems are prevented from occurring (for example, see Patent Document 1).
Related art list JPA laid-open 2001-331324.